Rohrschneider, RobertMiller, Sara Laren2020-01-172020-01-172019-05-312019http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:16532https://hdl.handle.net/1808/29892Political discontent appears to be growing across the aging democratic world, with an increase in popular support in many nations for niche or populist parties. Although often connected to this declining support for mainstream parties and the rise of these competitors, it is unclear precisely what is contributing to this diminishing political trust across varying electorates. This dissertation suggests that political discontent may be driven by parties failing to represent voters, a possibly long standing behavior, first envisaged by Katz and Mair (1995) in the form of the cartel party theory. The cartel party theory suggests that as party systems mature, party behavior ultimately undermines representative connections with voters, with parties becoming increasingly reliant on their relationship with the state and their rivals to maintain their positions in government. If cartelistic behaviors have emerged, it is expected that parties will show broken voter-party linkages and increased collusive relationships with rival parties, thus limiting competition, while undermining representation. Furthermore, the issues that are presented to voters across elections should show signs of manipulation, meaning that parties should fail to respond to voters while coordinating to manipulate their issue positions with their rivals. These two central expectations have guided the following research, testing whether parties appear to be colluding with their rivals and disregarding voter sentiments and if the issue spaces that are presented to voters remains representative or manipulated, as suggested by the cartel party theory. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), this work tests whether voter-party linkages appear intact across the left/right issue dimension, multidimensional issues, and party types. The findings suggest that mainstream parties are colluding with their rivals to limit inter-party competition, while presenting increasingly manipulated issue spaces to voters, suggesting that deepening discontent across advanced democracies may be connected to representative failures of parties participating in cartelistic collusion. rivals to limit inter-party competition, while presenting increasingly manipulated issue spaces to voters, suggesting that the increasing discontent across advanced democra- cies may be connected to representative failures of parties participating in cartelistic collusion.171 pagesenCopyright held by the author.Political sciencecarte party theorycollusionissue spaceparty behaviorrepresentationvoter-party linkageDissertationhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8558-6714openAccess